When Black people first learned to read during and after slavery, they found in the Bible a God who stood unmistakably with the oppressed. The story of Exodus became their story, affirming that God liberates rather than subjugates, uplifts rather than crushes. From this foundation, Black Americans embraced Christianity with a fervor rooted not in sentiment but in lived truth. The teachings of Jesus—love, justice, humility, mercy—became the bedrock of a faith that sustained generations through suffering and inspired movements for freedom.
We have just passed the Christmas season, when Christian churches across the country celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ. Yet in a nation as divided as ours, the season invites a deeper question: what version of Christianity is being celebrated? Is it the faith rooted in the humility of a child born among the poor, proclaimed as good news to the marginalized, and embodied in a life devoted to justice and love? Or is it a Christianity reshaped to serve power, exclusion, and national dominance? This question matters, because the answer reveals not only how we understand Jesus, but how we understand ourselves as a nation.
Today, the gulf between this liberating Black Christian tradition and the ideology of Christian Nationalism could not be wider. Black Christianity sees faith as a force for justice and universal dignity. Christian Nationalism, by contrast, fuses religious identity with political domination, defining “real Americans” through narrow cultural and racial boundaries and using Scripture as a tool to enforce hierarchy. What began within the conservative evangelical movement has now been turbocharged by its relationship with the Trump administration, which baptized grievance politics, nativism, and strongman power in the language of Christian virtue. The danger to the country can never be clearer, for when immorality masquerading as doctrine is married to the power of the state, democracy itself is imperiled.
James Cone, in God of the Oppressed, reminds us that true Christian faith begins with God’s solidarity with the marginalized. Cone argues that any theology detached from the liberation of the oppressed is a distortion of the Gospel itself—a point that makes the moral bankruptcy of Christian Nationalism unmistakably clear.
To say that Christian Nationalists are practicing heresy is almost too generous. Heresy at least pretends to engage the Christian tradition. What we confront today is something more troubling: the inversion of morality itself. A theology that blesses cruelty, sanctifies lies, and elevates exclusion as righteousness is not merely a deviation from Christian teaching—it is a repudiation of it. When such a bastardized theology gains political power, the nation faces not just a religious crisis but a civic one, for no democracy can thrive when its moral foundation is deliberately turned upside down.
At a moment when the nation’s moral compass is under assault, the witness of Black Christianity offers a powerful corrective. It reminds America that true faith is measured not by how loudly one brandishes symbols but by how faithfully one practices justice, honors human dignity, and walks in the liberating spirit of Christ.